


weekends are for the dogs

by rizahawkaye



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25008226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: Ronan Lynch - fresh off the loss of his father, the truth of his Dreams - has so much to learn about himself, about Dreamers, about Niall, and about the black-coated wolf that tears its way through Henrietta.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, pynch
Comments: 3
Kudos: 58
Collections: TRC Big Bang 2020





	weekends are for the dogs

**Author's Note:**

> heyyyyyyyyy! this fic took a while to write. mostly because i participated in 3 big bangs and a few zines all at once, but also because ive moved/covid happened/i had surgery/finished didactic coursework for graduate school/started fieldwork 2 for my graduate degree all the last few months. that is to say, i had originally hoped to finish this entire fic in one go, and it was going to be much, much longer, but my life had other plans and i, subservient to life as i always am, did my Best. i hope you all enjoy it despite that <3
> 
> and, yes! i do have plans to finish this one up~ ...by august 1st

I

Ronan could smell the sugar. Not the whipped cream or the batter or the syrup; he could smell the _sugar_. Uninhibited, pure and granulated sugar. 

There wasn’t a person alive who would look at Ronan Lynch and claim that he must have a thing for sugar because — according to local legend, to the Aglionby boys, to Declan, even — he was dark, sharp, knuckles permanently bruised from (nightmares) fist fights in Walmart parking lots. He spent his Saturday mornings rummaging through the dumpsters outside a Neiman Marcus searching for accidentally discarded diamonds and the sequins from $89.99 dresses off the poorly-named discount racks because he, a fully grown man, would have nothing better to do with his weekends than collect shiny things like the birds do. Allegedly. According to...

Ronan was far from aware of where such rumors had come from and he’d very much like to sink his fist into the mouth of whoever had started them, but that may have proven their point and rendered his null and void. 

What he really did on his Saturdays was just as filthy as playing in the ball pit of discarded clothes and the half eaten Starbucks sandwiches of overworked Neiman employees, but it was leagues more entertaining.

Ronan volunteered.

Ronan volunteered at a dog shelter.

“I really hope they don’t forget the strawberries this time.” Gansey stood on his toes to see over Ronan’s shoulder and into the kitchen. A corner wall jutted out to block most of their view, but Gansey and Ronan could see (and Ronan could smell) the pancakes, the sugar, bubbling on the flat, non-stick grill. “They forgot the strawberries last time and I’ve got to say it just isn’t the same.”

Gansey volunteered with Ronan every other Saturday. His favorite dog was an old bastard named Ramsay, a black lab with a thick band of grey around his mouth. He liked to drool on Ronan’s boots and piss on the floor. “You’re being a bitch,” Ronan said. “You’ll take what you get cuz these pancakes are $7.97 for four stacks and that’s a steal. We’re robbing them.”

Gansey threw a look at Ronan and then a look at the kitchen but didn’t say anything else. Possibly he knew Ronan was right, possibly he didn’t care either way. Gansey didn’t come to a rundown dog shelter on Saturday mornings out of the goodness of his heart or even because he wanted pancakes, but because he needed 1) stuff to put on his resumé(s) and college applications and 2) a reason to talk to a crazy-haired chick named Blue. Ronan was unconcerned with either of those things as he’d dropped out of high school four months ago (because he respects himself) and was starting to suspect he was as gay as he’s always thought (because he respects himself). He understood resumés very little and girls even less so. 

Gansey, however, he knew very well. 

“You buy the pancakes every weekend. And Blue takes hers every weekend. And you’ve never scored.” Ronan said. The woman at the counter called Gansey’s name and Ronan went to retrieve the bag of sugary pancakes from her. Ronan slid her a $5. They weren’t supposed to take tips but he didn’t give a shit, and neither did she. She pocketed the money with a wink.

“I don’t go to the shelter with you for Blue.” Gansey lied. His eyes had traveled to the phone in his hand, thumb absently caressing the screen as he scrolled through his Twitter feed. Nothing but BBC and NPR articles, Ronan thought. The barely-eighteen Dick Gansey was anything but barely-eighteen. He had the mannerisms of an eighty-year-old three times divorced millionaire and sometimes that admittedly unnerved Ronan, but for reasons he couldn’t quite place. “I go there because I enjoy the dogs.”

“No you don’t.”

“I go there for the apps.”

“The what?”

“You know,” Gansey said, “the admission applications.” They had made their way to the car now, and Ronan balanced the pancakes on his forearm while he fished for his keys in his pocket. Gansey motioned at him from over the top of the Beemer. “Harvard, Stanford, all the -ards and -ords.” 

“You’re a shitty liar.” Ronan said. 

The shelter, while seemingly clean, always smelled kind of like a dog had taken a shit in a corner three days ago and no one had found it yet. There was a possibility of that, but Ronan doubted it. He was pretty diligent in his post-adoptions cleaning duties. There was a bucket of diluted bleach in the ten-by-ten laundry room, and Ronan filled every crevice in the shelter with it at the end of the day. If there was shit, he’d know. 

No, Ronan supposed the smell was just a part of the building — a concrete warehouse-looking thing normal people would use to store cars or boats. It lived among a collection of tan-and-white buildings with exactly the same specs as it — though most were used as offices for roofing companies or as shops for motorcycle repairs and tire replacements. It was sort of odd to work in what was essentially a mini neighborhood of testosterone with a bunch of middle aged women who had a habit of calling Ronan “Ronny” because they thought it was clever or cute or something. 

Ronan let it slide, if only for the dogs. 

“Hey Dick,” Blue called from over the din of dog barks and whines. “Could you bring me some paper towels? Lysol?” 

“Oh dear Blue, I don’t know how many times we must go through this but please call me Gansey.” Gansey pulled on the word, stretching it out between his teeth like he wasn’t sure she’d heard him right the other two times he’d told her that morning. She cracked a sly smile. 

“I don’t have all day, Dick.” 

Gansey sighed but did as she asked. It wasn’t like him to be so into someone that he’d basically be their ball boy, but something about Blue Sargent commanded it of him. Not in a bad way, but in a way that made Gansey seem a little more like the teenager he was and a little less like an elderly man. She made him playful, and while there was a bit of Ronan that was jealous there was more of him that was grateful. Gansey hadn’t been the same since Ronan’s dad died. He recognized that that was a weird thought — that his friend was having a hard time adjusting to his friend’s dad’s untimely death — but Gansey had been swarming Ronan like a buzzard, like he expected him to drop dead at any moment. Gansey hadn’t been the same since Niall died. That had more to do with Ronan than it did Niall. Gansey liked Niall, but Ronan had come apart when Niall died, and it was Ronan who concerned Gansey the most. It was Ronan who had Gansey’s heart.

And Ronan was glad to see someone steering him away from all that — from a thing that was not and could not be his responsibility. 

Things started to slow down around lunchtime and Ronan settled into the leather armchair in the office to eat his lunch of roast beef and rosemary potatoes. Cold, because the microwave had stopped working and Ronan wasn’t a pissbaby. He fished his phone from his jacket pocket and checked his texts. Nothing but a bossy string of messages from Declan and a few memes from Matthew. Ronan deleted the Declan texts but responded to Matthews with a gif of a raccoon clapping its hands. Not really much of a meme guy, but Ronan would lick a pile of dog shit for his younger brother. 

He thumbed through the news app on his phone. There were stories about Virginia fires in Virginia homes, a businessman from D.C. going bankrupt, a murder in Philly that was likely drug-related. Ronan moved along through each story disinterestedly, his mind being called away every few words by the yaps of puppies and the yelps of shelter staff as said puppies nibbled their hands and ankles. Every minute or two he would glance up through the office blinds to see someone with several puppies falling out of their arms, and more running loose over the bleached floor. Some even stuck their tongues into the bleach-water mixture by each puppy pen, there for potential adopters to step their shoes into before entering a pen. 

Ronan was just about to close the app when his eyes snagged on a headline: KILLER DOG SLAUGHTERS HORSE, MAN SAYS. Ronan opened the article. Halfway down the page was an old guy in faded brown overalls, his beard eating up three-quarters of his face, eyes crinkled with wrinkles. The caption below read: KEN MILLER, AGE 56, TAKES PHOTO OF ANIMAL HE CLAIMS IS A DOG EATING HIS HORSE. Scrolling further down looking for the photo, Ronan found it near the end of the article. It was blurry, like really blurry, and he couldn’t see anything of the horse, but silhouetted against the heavy flood of moonlight was a rounded tuft of coarse, thick fur. Following the line of the animal’s spine, Ronan spied two ears, pricked forward in interest, and the side view of a gleaming wet muzzle. 

For a moment, Ronan was worried he dreamt the beast himself. He searched his brain for any memory of a large, rounded dog and came up blank. The fresh bruises on his hands and the scratches on his back were from his nightmares, nothing else. He’d know if they had come from something else, right? Ronan screenshotted the picture of the animal and locked his phone. Whatever it was, whether it had come from him or not, it couldn’t be his problem right now. 

II

Gansey normally didn’t stay all day. He had made a promise to Ronan that, as a part of his commitment to the shelter on Saturday mornings, he would never stay after to scrub puppy poop off the concrete floors. But Blue always stayed, week after week, to help Ronan make the bleach-water and douse it over the floor, flooding every crack and corner with it. The whole room smelled like muted bleach, and it burned Ronan’s nose hairs, and bleach didn’t really get rid of the worst of the puppy diseases, but it was a necessary precaution. Something was better than nothing.

Gansey stayed behind this time. Blue taught him how to mix the bleach and water (simple, it was one part bleach to thirty-two parts water) and fitted him with a blotchy blue apron so his Hardvard t-shirt wouldn’t get ruined. Gansey took up Ronan’s spot side-by-side dribbling bleach over the floor. The two of them laid towels over the wet and scrubbed the bleach into the floor with their feet, getting on their hands and knees to use their nails to get into tiny crevices. Ronan had been dumbstruck. Gansey, on all fours, nose inches from diluted bleach, rubbing puppy stains out of the polished concrete. 

Now, the three of them were eating burgers at the diner that served pancakes in the mornings. Technically, the diner was an all-day breakfast diner with lunch and dinner specials, but Ronan never had breakfast twice in a day. He ordered a swiss burger with jalapenos and no onions. Gansey ordered a house salad, and when Ronan’s burger came Gansey swiped a few of his fries. Ronan glared at him as he dipped the fries in his ranch dressing, leaning back against the booth. “If you wanted fries then you shouldn’t have ordered a salad, dumbass.” Ronan hissed from across the table. Blue laughed and took a bite of her veggie burger, black bean patty coming apart and spilling out onto her plate. She had sweet potato fries, and Gansey snagged a few of those too. 

“Burgers make my stomach do funny flips.” Gansey explained. He winced when he tried the sweet potato fry with ranch. “Gross. Not the same.”

“So order a salad with a side of fries and leave us be, leech.” Blue said. She was cutting into her burger now, dipping it into ketchup and eating it with a fork. 

“Hurtful,” Gansey whined, then took a few more of Ronan’s fries. Ronan swatted him.

Blue and Gansey started to chat about puppies and resumés and Ronan checked out. His mind wandered back to the article on his phone, the screenshot he’d gotten of the strange dog as it crouched over a horse. Ronan worked with a lot of dogs and he’d never seen one with a rounded back like that. He’d never seen one large enough to take out a horse, either. And that animal was tearing into the horse’s throat, its muzzle half buried in the soft flesh. Ronan was about to mention the sighting when his phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Matthew and a series of texts. 

_I think there’s something outside, Ronan._

_Declan isn’t home so i dont know what to do_

_Where are you? Its loud i think its in the trash cans_

_Should i go see what it is?_

Ronan texted his brother back. _Stay inside. Go upstairs. I’m coming home._

“I gotta go,” Ronan said. He took a few bills from his wallet and placed them under his plate. He stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth. “Matthew’s freaking out about something in the garbage at the Barns.” Home, Ronan told himself. Something at home. “Declan’s not there and Matthew’s too nice to tell whatever it is to piss off.” Ronan neglected to mention that he was concerned about the horse-eating dog, that he was worried it may have found its way to Matthew and the Barns and that, if it was his creation, somehow, it would do something bad there. All the cows, laid out in the pasture, sleeping, easy prey. His father’s dreamt cows. 

“Okay,” Gansey said, going a little green in the face. 

“See ya later, Gansey. Sargent.” Ronan left them at the booth, Gansey asking if he should take up Ronan’s place and Blue telling him it was all right. He could stay where he was. 

Ronan started up the BMW. The gentle, familiar hum of the engine was just what he needed to calm down. Why were a few texts from Matthew getting his heart rate up like this? The likelihood of whatever was at the Barns being anything but a raccoon or opossum was so low an ant coulda walked over it. But the image of the dog wouldn’t relent, burrowing into the backs of Ronan’s eyes like a bad memory. If that was something he created and it hurt Matthew, he would never forgive himself. He pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto the highway, flooding the asphalt in front of him with his headlights. 

The Barns were quiet when Ronan pulled up to the house. There was nothing outside but inky blackness and the small, beady orbs of rabbits and ground squirrels. He turned off the Beemer’s engine and sat, waiting, listening for something off. He heard nothing but the rustle of the fields and the creaking of the weathervane on the house, flipping back and forth with the wind. 

The garbage bins were knocked over beside the garage. Their contents were spilled over the gravel and Ronan swooped down to scoop the empty ice cream tubs and used napkins and greasy pizza boxes back into the bins. He decided to walk the farmhouse’s perimeter. He pressed his flashlight on on his phone and swung it in an arc as he walked, checking the house and then the vast, black fields all around him. Nothing was out of the ordinary. The weeds were overgrown at the house’s base, sprouting yellow flowers on their ends, and there was a baseball and bat behind the house, clustered in more weeds. But no weird sounds, and no weird dogs. 

Ronan stopped short when he came up on the wall of the house directly below his second-story bedroom window. There were long, jagged claw marks in the wood paneling. They started halfway to Ronan’s window and ended a few inches before the ground, where the wood splintered into starbursts. He swallowed hard, not quite believing his own eyes. And then he took a picture. 

As he rounded the house to the kitchen, Ronan studied the photo. He could see it better on his phone’s camera than he had been able to just now under the flashlight. He zoomed in. There was nothing else in the photo — no track marks in the dirt, no paw prints on the side of the house. There were only the jagged marks, dug deep. Under his bedroom window and nowhere else. 

Ronan called for Matthew when he made it inside. He locked the kitchen door behind him and texted Declan to let him know he’d be setting the house alarms. Matthew poked his head out from the top of the stairs. “Nothing?” He said.

“Nope,” Ronan lied.

“Sorry I pulled you away from your friends.”

“It’s all right,” said Ronan as he started the espresso machine. “I don’t like them that much.”

“You like Gansey a lot.” Ronan didn’t say anything to that. It was as much a fact as the color of the sky. “Can I have some?”

“Caffeine makes you insane.”

“Maybe I want to be insane.” The stairs screamed as Matthew descended them. He had a lead foot, and the old farmhouse never let anyone forget it. Niall used to joke that once Matthew started driving they’d have to watch him for speeding. With how heavy his foot was, he’d never be able to let off the gas. “You’re supposed to push this button first.” Matthew said, and pushed an oval button. It burned orange and the machine began to whirr. Then, a moment later, it spit out semi-opaque liquid, bits of leftover coffee grounds dusting the bottom of Ronan’s cup.

“Gross, Matthew,” he said. “I was going to use that.”

“You had to clean it first.” Matthew shrugged. His curls shrugged with him, bounding about around his rounded face. He went to the cabinet and got them each a mug, a red one for himself and a Mickey Mouse one for Ronan. 

The brothers stood in silence as the espresso machine worked its magic. Ronan’s ass was buzzing, indicating that Declan was trying to call or was sending text after text in a Declan-like frenzy. Ronan didn’t usually advocate for securing the farmhouse, and his message to Declan earlier had probably startled him. But after that article — and the claw marks outside and Niall Lynch’s strange, violent death — Ronan didn't want to take any chances. He couldn’t stand to lose another Lynch, even if that Lynch was named Declan. He let his phone go off without tending to it. 

“Should we make some for Mom?” Matthew pressed. He was stirring creamer into his cup. So much that the dark coffee turned almost white as milk. 

“It won’t do anything, Matthew.” 

“Right,” Matthew said. He smiled. It was sad, but only to the trained eye. To anyone else Matthew Lynch was happy; a good, agreeable boy. All the time, never faltering as children tended to do. To Ronan, that smile was tired. “I’m gonna go read to her, I think. You sure you didn’t see anything outside?” Matthew was already turning toward the room where Aurora Lynch waited, catatonic, as asleep as Niall’s cows.

“I’d tell you if I did.”

“Right.”

Ronan dropped a single tablespoon of sugar into his coffee and padded across the kitchen and into the foyer. In the corner, by the window and its flowery curtains, was a single TV monitor propped up on a stool. Ronan sat in front of it. It was out of place in the sparse foyer, its black screen reflecting Ronan and Mickey Mouse and the staircase that curled into the foyer and led to the living room. Ronan turned the monitor on and the screen exploded into tiles. In the upper right, the window outside Ronan’s bedroom. Upper middle, Declan’s. Upper left, Matthew’s. Each tile displayed a different part of the house. In the middle tile Ronan saw Matthew criss-crossed on the floor at their mother’s feet, reading something big to her. His mug of coffee was on her side table. 

Ronan used the remote beside the monitor to rewind. He watched Matthew leave Aurora’s room and go into the kitchen, and then he watched Matthew return to Aurora and then to the window in the living room, cupping his hands over his face and peering out into the dark. He punched text after text into his phone, paced, and finally walked backward upstairs. Ronan stopped then. He pressed play, watched the outdoor cameras. They had one at each entrance to the house, as well as over each of the brother’s windows. Ronan had taken the one that faced his father’s safe and put it into Aurora’s bedroom a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to see what she was doing. If she ever woke up and at what time during the day. But she never did. She stayed still as could be on her rocking chair, staring blankly ahead. Sometimes, as he watched the footage, Ronan imagined she was looking into the camera. Silent eyes pleading with him. 

There. Ronan paused. There was a mark on the screen, like a smudge. Everything else around it was clear as could be for home security, but this one smudge was bulky, fuzzy, like someone had taken black paint and smeared it over the camera. Ronan looked closely and he saw the smudge at different times: when Matthew looked out the window, the smudge was under Ronan’s window and when Matthew looked away to text Ronan, the smudge activated the motion sensitive light over the garage and was blotting out the trash cans. 

Ronan left his coffee to get cold. He needed to dream.

Ronan went outside to dream. Not his most responsible move, but he couldn’t risk dreaming in the house. Not if whatever this black blur was had come from him — if it had come from him at all. He would usually wake from a dream and know if he’d brought something back. He’d feel it in his hands, corporeal, or see it, smell it, hear it. But this one seemed to have bypassed his consciousness, slipping around it and out like a water snake through weeds. 

He laid down in the pasture, where the cows sat sleeping. There was enough room out here that he could summon a small building — a post office or a coffee shop — and be okay. He closed his eyes. The wind blew blades of grass over his arms, little wisps along his skin, tickling him. He could hear nothing but the oppressive quiet — a quiet he used to appreciate until his father had died and the world had gone askew, throwing strange undulating noises over his silence. Like rumblings underwater. He used to sit in this pasture, the sky an explosion of glittering stars, and dream in a world he had never seen before. He was beginning to experience that world like it was a part of him; a part of his family. He tried not to be angry at his dead father, but dreaming would have been more bearable if he’d had someone to do it with. Knowing his father was a dreamer didn’t pacify him, just stirred feelings, some positive, most not. Declan hadn’t necessarily been kind when he delivered the “you’re a dreamer, Ronan” line. 

“So, it’s a Lynch thing,” Ronan had said. 

“It’s a Niall and Ronan Lynch thing,” Declan had said back. “It’s a Declan Lynch thing to be aware of the Niall and Ronan Lynch thing, and it’s a Matthew Lynch thing to be oblivious to it all.”

He drifted into sleep without realizing it. 

When he woke in the dream, Ronan was in a room crammed with things. All kinds of things: jewelry, a shovel propped up in the corner, a sofa, red velvet, four shelving units, wooden, etched, rugs and chandeliers, jars filled with rocks and feathers and corn and flour. Ronan lifted a bowl off one of the shelves. It was heavy, like it was loaded with lead, and inside of it was water, fish swimming about within it. He caught a glimpse of a miniscule shark and placed the bowl back on the shelf, willing himself not to bring it back with him. 

All around him were trinkets and tools and toys he needed to avoid. He had to side step his way through the whole of the room, zigzagging from one end to the other in a jagged, tiptoe gait that made him feel like he was thirteen again and his father was breathing down his neck about cleaning his room. On the floor were scooters and tricycles, basketballs and old GameBoys. He picked one up and turned it over. It had his name on it, scrawled on the battery compartment in silver Sharpie. Ronan inspected it: blue, the cartridge empty, a scratch on the bottom left corner of the screen. It was his. It struck him that he was in a room full of the things he had owned, or that his family had owned or currently owned. It was like he was flipping through the archives of his own memory. 

When he thought about it, that seemed to be a lot of what dreams were.

Ronan danced around the objects that had once been his or Declan’s or Matthew’s or the family’s. He was dreaming, but he didn’t want to break anything. A fragile part of him worried that damaging something in this dream might come back to haunt him when he woke, like stepping on a crack and breaking your mother’s back. Or so the rhyme went. He had learned that his mind was not safe. It was not conventionally safe and it was not _safe_ safe. If he could bring things back without being consciously aware, then what else might he be able to do? Break something in a dream that ends up breaking in real life? He stayed away from things he knew no one kept in the Barns anymore, just in case.

Briefly, Ronan thought of bringing the whole room back with him. The thought was not a conscious want, but a nagging press at the nape of his neck. It urged him forward into the room of nostalgia and he remembered then that he had come for something to ward off a dog. He hadn’t come with his family in mind, and especially not his old possessions, which he hadn’t thought about since Niall’s death. It would be nice, though, he admitted, to bring Matthew some piece of normalcy back from his venture into the unnatural. 

Ronan wandered through the room. In one corner, a bookshelf, stuffed with action figures and dolls from his childhood, topped off by bowls of ice cream piled high with whipped cream, large, rounded cherries on top. There were five bowls there, and Ronan didn't need to think hard to understand the implication — there were five people in his family. 

Ronan was yanked from his musings when the toe of his boot slammed into something. He nearly fell forward and only stopped himself from ramming his face into the wall by throwing an arm out to brace himself at the last second.

He looked down. At his feet was a small chest, maybe twelve-by-ten, rectangular, wooden. It was embellished in fake gold around the rim, and there was a golden metal lock on its front. No key, however. And it was heavy. Ronan lifted it with both hands, shook it carefully so he wouldn't break whatever was inside. Its contents jangled like keys or spoons. He fiddled with the lock but it wouldn't budge.

Ronan recognized everything else in the room; the clocks on the walls, the dolls on their shelves, the ice cream and the scooter and all manners of -balls, but the chest eluded him. It wasn't his, he had never seen it before, and it wasn't Matthew's because it wasn't Matthew's style to have a fancy mini chest. He had nothing to hide.

It could have been Declan's or Niall's. And knowing Declan and Niall, the key would be hidden somewhere different for each one of them. Declan was more the secret-hole-behind-a-picture kind of guy, and Niall was the kind who would keep the key on his person at all times. In his pocket, on a chain, in a locket around his neck, a compartment in his phone. Declan was sneaky, but he was not Niall sneaky, and there would be no place Declan could dream of hiding a key that Ronan couldn't dream out.

Since Niall was long gone, that meant the chest had to be Declan's. Ronan went to work searching the room. He checked the bookshelves. He dumped the ice cream out onto the floor and popped the -balls and the wheels of the bikes. There were no pictures on the walls, but Ronan used a baseball bat to put holes in them anyway, stuffed his hand in and felt around in the insulation and the dust. He thought that maybe Declan had rid himself of the chest and not the key, and that was why the key wasn't in the room (which would be a very Declan thing to do), until a glint above the door caught his eye.

He went to it, dodging the melting piles of ice cream, and ran his fingers over the lip of the doorframe. He came away with a small key, no bigger than the last joint of his pinky finger. It fit in the chest's lock.

Inside were a few very Declan-esque things and a few... not so Declan things. There were spoons, which was odd, and more keys, which was also odd, but there was also an old pocket knife that Ronan recognized as having belonged to Niall. Had Declan thrown the chest away knowing the knife had been in there? Ronan pocketed it, thinking he would dream it out.

The chest was as eclectic as a chest of discarded things could be: a nudie mag, a rolled-up newspaper announcing some old before-Ronan-was-born presidential election, practice college essays. Ronan felt a little like he was invading Declan's privacy, shuffling through his dream things that were also real things, but he got over it fast.

Someone knocked on the door.

He awoke, something cold and hard in his palm, the size of a small stone. He sat up, unfolded his hand, and there in the center of it was a whistle, gleaming in the hard white moonlight. He didn’t dare press it to his lips. He had been tricked by dreams before — alarm clocks that never shut off if you set them, and music boxes that spun endlessly — and he wasn’t going to mess around with a whistle he’d dreamt up for a giant dog. 

He stood and pocketed the whistle. Whether he tested it out now or not, it would either be effective or he’d have to dream something else. He went inside the farmhouse, threw himself onto the couch, and called Gansey.

III

Gansey hadn’t said much, which was concerning in its own right. Gansey was a boy who courted the supernatural, nurtured it like flowers in a garden. He plucked mysteries from the world like fruit from a tree. Yet the mystery of this… massive dog managed to merely tug at his interest instead of pull outright. Ronan found it maddening and, though he hated to admit it, unfair that his plight should be met with a shrug and cocksure indifference. 

“I think you would know if you did this.” Gansey said. They were bent together over an iron table, just large enough for two cups of overpriced coffee. “You’ve known every other time you’ve dreamt something, Ronan. I don’t see how this could be any different.”

“I dream things into existence, Dick, and you think that means that must be where the strangeness stops?” Ronan said. “Because I do one fucked up thing doesn’t mean it can’t change. Or evolve. Or whatever the hell this might be.” The fact that Ronan had only just started coming to terms with what his affliction was sat heavy as stone in his gut. But the fact that it could be changing, growing inside of him and doing things that he had no control over… He wanted Gansey to be sympathetic, not dismissive. It was killing things, this beast. It wasn’t a lost puppy. Ronan thought of the blood glistening on its jowls in the article, the moonlight spreading over the black wetness. 

“I think we should give it time before we go freaking out. Besides, you’ve got that fancy whistle. And I’ve got midterms next week.” Gansey threw the rest of his coffee back like a fraternity boy throwing back a shot. 

Gansey had four midterms the following week. Ronan had none. He’d taken to his unorthodox teen freedom by sleeping (and dreaming) in the early afternoons and driving through Henrietta at night. 

Grudgingly, Ronan admitted that Gansey had been right. Nothing exceptionally terrible had happened in the seven days since Ronan had dreamt the whistle in the pasture. There were no more articles on the large dog, unless Ronan counted the follow-up blips, usually just two or three paragraphs about maybe-sightings-that-weren’t-really-sightings, and an ad from the local police about animal safety. The local NRA chapter had poked their noses into the mess as well, throwing signs out over manicured lawns. PROTECT YOUR HOME, they said, PROTECT YOUR FAMILY.

They could arm themselves all they wanted, Ronan thought, but if this animal really was one of his dreams come to life then there was a good chance it wouldn't bow to a bullet. Ronan had never seen a beast like this before, but something inside of him stirred when he looked at it, a voice at the shell of his ear.

He met with Gansey the week after his midterms. He was exhausted, his sleep schedule having been flipped so abruptly, but he chugged a 5-Hour Energy and sat outside Blue Sargent’s house, his ass going numb on the hard concrete. “Why’d we meet here?” He tried not to sound annoyed, but he suspected Gansey had a new girlfriend — or girlfriend-adjacent — and to subject Ronan to her felt like a personal affront, even if it was Blue.

“Because I wanted to see both you and Blue at once.” Gansey said, grinning. He was nursing a tea with lemon and a few of his peppermint leaves. He stuck one between his teeth before he took another drink of the tea. “Blue’s mom makes the good stuff,” he said, and raised his glass at Ronan. “They think you’re scary, dude, but if you wanted some I’m sure they’d oblige.”

“I’m not here for tea.”

“You’re here to ask me about how my midterms went? How sweet of you.”

“No—”

“They went swell, dear Ronan,” Gansey said. “I think I made a fool of that Latin teacher.”

Ronan doubted that. If there was something Gansey wasn’t good at, it was Latin. Even if Ronan hated school, he didn’t hate Latin class, and it had been the only place he could go during the week that offered a reprieve from everything else shitty in his life. People thought it was the dumpsters, but it was Latin, and now the dog shelter, too. 

When Ronan didn't immediately bite at Gansey's bit, Gansey held out his phone. "Did you see this?” he said. He was showing Ronan his screen. More specifically, he was showing Ronan a headline.

DOG WITH HANDS? it read, and beneath that, the first few sentences: Henrietta is afraid to walk the streets at night for fear of crossing paths with a mangey... dog? Authorities are on high alert as a southern Henrietta man captures video of the dog on his security cameras. You can see it clearly in the link below, but it seems Henrietta's farm-animal-feeding pup has swapped paws for hands.

Ronan grabbed Gansey's wrist and brought the phone closer to his face. "Is this real?" he said. "Or do you think it's a hoax?"

"The man who sent the video in did so without incentive. He's also eighty-seven years old, lives alone, and I highly doubt he knows how to doctor video footage. If you read further down it explains how police have combed through the footage and found no evidence of tampering. They think this is a kid in a fursuit." Gansey put his phone to sleep and slipped it into his pocket. "I can't say I agree. We both saw that first article. That dog had its maw in an animal."

"There can be no more doubt, Dick. I did this. This is my creature."

"There's the problem of the paws, though..." Gansey said. He took another drink of his tea, sighing contentedly. Condensation traveled from the glass to his fingers, and Ronan noticed the sweat on Gansey's throat, staining his collared shirt. "It has paws in the last picture we saw it in. Not hands, Ronan."

Ronan thought about this. And then: "Fuck."

"It's human."

"There are so many cops everywhere."

"That's why I'm driving and you aren't." Gansey took a left, past Blue's neighborhood and onto the highway that would take him from the suburbs to the farmland. "They're patrolling for your dog. Honestly, you should thank them."

"Shut up," said Ronan. He watched the trees as they cut off his view of the moon. It was late, about midnight, and though Ronan was used to not sleeping, he wasn't used to not sleeping with someone _s_.

"Have you tried the whistle yet?" said Blue. She disengaged her seatbelt and sat at the very edge of the Pig's back seat, so she could stick her head between Ronan and Gansey. "Maybe it'll call that thing to us," she said. Ronan had thought of that, and he'd also thought that there was a chance the whistle did nothing at all. Or a chance that it would anger the dog or harm a human.

"I want to wait until we're out in the middle of nowhere before I go endangering people's lives."

They'd told Blue the bare minimum for now — Ronan dreams, and sometimes Ronan brings things out of those dreams and into the real world. Blue hadn't had many questions, nor did she seem particularly perturbed. Apparently she came from a family of witches or something.

"That's just a hunch though, isn't it? That the whistle will do something bad. And if it does, wouldn't standing in the middle of a vacant field or some wooded area put us at risk?" Blue always spoke to Ronan like he was going through life with a handicap.

"Why did you come if you're worried about being mauled?" he sneered.

"You should be worried about being mauled too," she sneered back. "And I came because I want to know what's ravaging my hometown."

Gansey cleared his throat, signaling the end of their back-and-forth. Ronan folded his arms over his chest and sank further into his seat. He was admittedly annoyed that he wasn't driving, and that Gansey had invited Blue on their nighttime patrol. He didn't dislike her, but he found her prickly — a little left-winged firecracker — and he had a hard time with the energy.

Gansey pulled over some time later. Ronan exited the car like he was taking in fresh air for the first time in his life. The world opened up in front of him, a swaying expanse of Henrietta grass and a silver dollar sitting over all of it, throwing the fields into a grey-blue hue. Gansey came up on one side of him and Blue on the other and the three of them looked out into the open space together, wondering what they were about to encounter, wondering if they would encounter anything at all.

They walked a ways into the field, the grass brushing their palms and their wrists and shifting over their clothes. No one said anything, not even Blue, and when they were far enough away from the road that no one would be able to see them, Ronan pulled his dream whistle out of his pocket.

It looked like an ordinary whistle. It gleamed silver, was smooth to the touch, heavy and cool in his hand. "Flee now if you don't want your limbs ripped off or whatever this thing'll do," he said.

"I wonder if I could use that in my college applications. 'I was mauled by a dog in a field and now I have no arms.' I think they'd be sympathetic, don't you?" said Gansey. Ronan rolled his eyes. And then, before he could think about it any more, he put the whistle to his lips and blew.

Nothing happened. He waited, blew again, and still nothing happened. He couldn't even hear the whistle. No sound came out at all, but he could feel the air moving through it. He should at least hear the whoosh of air, but he heard nothing. The quiet when he blew the whistle was the most oppressive quiet he'd ever had the displeasure of knowing.

“Let me try,” said Blue, holding her hand out at him, palm up. Ronan looked at Blue and then Gansey, who shrugged. And then Blue said, “I’m right here. Let me try.” Ronan relinquished the whistle to the small spiky girl and she blew it but, like he thought, they heard no sound. “Can you bring broken things back from these dreams?”

Ronan clutched the pocket knife he’d also brought back from his dream. He almost forgot he had dreamt it out of that room. He pulled it from his pocket and flipped it open and closed. “Not this time,” he said to Blue. 

They left after each of them had had a chance to use the whistle. After it had failed to produce results during any of their turns, Ronan, Blue, and Gansey filed back into the Pig. Ronan had half expected to see a ticket on the windshield or for the great big orange beast to have been towed. But, miraculously, despite the dozens of cops fluttering around Henrietta, the Pig was awaiting them safe and sound and untouched. 

“That was a bust,” Gansey said. He settled in behind the steering wheel, and Ronan felt a pang of jealousy. That Gansey should have such a fantastic steed and refuse to ever push it past its limits was a personal slight against him and everything he believed. 

“We can try again tomorrow,” said Ronan. “If it doesn’t work again then I’ll dream something else up. If I’m the guy who dreamt that thing then I’ve got to be the guy who can dream it away.”

Gansey dumped Ronan off at the Barns. It was a bit out of his way, but Ronan had the suspicion that Gansey was going to use his drive home as uninterrupted Blue time. 

The first thing Ronan did upon stepping out of the Pig was check his phone. He had two missed calls, both from Declan, so he ignored them. He had a text from Matthew — a Spongebob meme. Ronan slipped his phone back into his pocket and went around to the garage to check the garbage bins. 

Nothing out of the ordinary. He opened the lid. The smell was rancid, but there was nothing inside but an empty pizza box and a bag of trash. Ronan made a mental note to dream up some self-cleaning bins during his next dream session.

Ronan went into the fields instead of going into the house. He knew Declan must be waiting for him because his sleek little black Mercedes was sitting in the driveway and not in the garage, which meant Declan was aware that Ronan was ignoring him and wanted Ronan to be aware of the fact that Declan was, indeed, aware. 

The fields around the Barns had ceased to be unsettling since Niall died. Everything that had once taken up occupancy there had since fallen asleep, coma-like, the same as Aurora Lynch. Walking the fields of the Barns was no longer dissimilar to walking alone in one of Ronan’s dreams: everything had an eerie air to it, the corners of Ronan’s vision shimmering like hot asphalt. There was no way to know whether this had anything to do with Niall or not (What if Niall had dreamt the Barns? What if he had taken the grass and soil from the dreams themselves, his hands fisted with it, pockets full?) but that didn’t stop him from wondering. 

He had a seat well into the field, far enough away that he could no longer make out the blackened silhouette of Declan’s car in the driveway. Ronan took the whistle from his pocket. He turned it over in his hands. If it didn’t work, then he would dream something different. But he knew it had to work — that had been the intent going in, to pull something from his dream that would work. All he had to do was think it, and his dreams gave it to him. Like he was a whining child and the dream was his mother, doing whatever it took to appease him. 

He took the whistle between his lips and tried a different tune. This time, he played a very abbreviated version of an old Irish song Niall used to listen to when he was working in his study. He waited a few seconds and when the dog didn’t show up, he tried something else: a low, slow whistle. He couldn’t hear it himself, but he knew from the way his throat had opened that he was playing something deep, and dark. 

In the same moment that the note ended, Ronan heard a high-pitch yelp. Immediately following the yelp was a string of whimpers, like nails on a chalkboard, and Ronan shot to his feet. 

He smelled the dog before he saw it. He felt the dog before he saw it. 

Ronan stood still, so still that someone watching might have thought he was a scarecrow or an oddly-shaped tree. All the air seemed to be sucked out of the fields, replaced only by the intense, overpowering stench of tangy blood. A chill ran the length of Ronan’s spine, cold pricks of ice disengaged from his spine and fell about his neck and his shoulders, dousing him in gooseflesh. Something hot was at his nape, a wet, humid heat. The panting in his ear was a roar. 

The whistle was creaking under the force of Ronan’s fist. He didn’t know how long he had been standing there under the oppressive power of the too-fucking-big dog, but it could have been minutes before he turned around; just the slow twisting of his head, his chin barely coming up over the apex of his shoulder, so he could get a glimpse of the dog. 

Its muzzle was like nothing Ronan had ever seen. Twice as long and thick as any of the shelter dogs’, this dog's muzzle jutted out over a foot from its face, and was framed by two large, nearly black eyes. Within it, two rows of blade-like teeth. 

And its paws, coming up over Ronan’s head, on either side, weren’t paws at all but hands. 

Long, thin, nimble fingers. Manicured nails except for the crusted blood and dirt. 

Ronan’s hand was cramping around the whistle now. He forced himself to let up on it and turn fully, so he was face-to-face with the dog. Or, rather, so he was face (Ronan) to chest (dog). He noticed that the dog had human feet, bare and caked in mud and rubbed red and raw from wandering around the Henrietta countryside without protection. 

Ronan put one hand out as far as space allowed. He didn’t want to touch the dog, but he wanted to keep the dog at a distance too. It looked at him with black, pitless eyes, but eyes that understood him, too. They watched him curiously, knowingly, as he lifted the whistle to his mouth and whistled that same low tune as before. 

The dog crumpled to the grass. The high-pitched whining was back, and the dog’s image began to shatter, break away. It was human-looking in spurts, in pieces, fur falling away one moment to reveal a smooth, pale chest, or the swathe of a collar bone, or the bulbs of a spine and then returning the next. 

Though Ronan hated to see the dog writhing, he had to catch it. It was his responsibility, and the dog was killing things — animals, but how long would it be until it migrated to killing humans? He kept the low tone going until the dog finally quieted, all the black fur disappearing in waves, proximal to distal, starting at the hard line of a very human stomach and ending at very human wrists.

Ronan looked on in wonder as the dog gave way to a boy. 

Naked, his chest rising and falling a little too fast to be comfortable, the boy curled in on himself in the grass. He was young, Ronan’s age. Ronan went down on his knees, ghosting his hands over the boy’s frame, watching his eyes flutter behind closed lids. He pushed the boy’s hair from his face.

“What the fuck,” he said, and moved closer. “What the fuck.”

The boy with manicured nails, with slim fingers and battered feet, was from Aglionby. He had sandy brown hair, a thin face, and there were oily smudges on his palms. 

“Parrish.”

Adam Parrish still hadn’t woken up yet.

Ronan had removed his own shirt in the field and used it to cover Adam as best as he could. He carried him into the house, careful not to alert Declan or Matthew, and dressed him in his own clothes: a pair of plaid pyjama pants and a white t-shirt leftover from before Ronan had moved out. That was around 10PM last night, and Ronan hadn’t slept, instead handcuffing Adam to his bedpost and sitting in his old gaming chair in the corner of his old room, watching. He didn’t know what exactly he was watching for, except that if he saw any fur, he would have to blow furiously on the whistle again. 

By 10AM, Adam still hadn’t moved, though Ronan would occasionally put a hand to Adam’s chest to feel for breathing. It was moving slower now, deeper. Ronan retreated into his bathroom to change and wash his face, and then went downstairs to brew some coffee. He made two cups, one for him and one for Adam, if he ever woke up, then returned to his bedroom to wait some more. 

Matthew stopped him on the stairs. “I didn’t hear you come home last night.”

“I didn’t want D to hear me come home last night,” said Ronan. The coffee cups were hot, stinging his hands. He hoped Matthew wouldn’t notice he was holding two instead of one. 

“Are you extra tired today or something?” Matthew said. He gestured to Ronan’s double dose of caffeine. “Yeah,” said Ronan, and slipped past his younger brother. “Have a good day at school,” he added, balancing one cup of coffee in the crook of his elbow and working his door open with his free hand. When he stepped inside his bedroom again, he saw Adam had woken up. He was staring at the cuff around his wrist. 

“You’re awake,” Ronan said. He deposited both cups on his nightstand. 

Adam lifted his face. Even after twelve hours of sleep, he looked tired, drained, like someone had siphoned out his blood. Ronan could see his veins through his opaque, pale skin, and the skin under his eyes was purple and saggy. Deep trenches of exhaustion. 

His eyes were the same, though. They had looked incredibly black in the dark, but Ronan noticed the color now, rings of sky blue lit up in the light filtering in through his bedroom window. 

“Ronan Lynch,” said Adam. He frowned. “Why am I handcuffed to your bed?” 

“I think you should be telling me that.”

Adam blinked. “What? How would I know? I barely know you. This doesn’t make any… sense…” he trailed off. 

As far as Ronan could tell he had two options: 1) He could tell Adam he knew he was a werewolf or 2) He could play dumb and pretend he really had no idea. If he went with option 1, Adam might leave Henrietta for fear of being outed, but if he went with option 2, he could better track Adam’s movements. All this was assuming Adam even knew what he was and/or that he was acting out of malice. It was perfectly reasonable that Adam couldn’t control his transformation, or even what he did while transformed, but Ronan remembered his human eyes above that massive maw, and his small, lithe hands growing out of thick, wiry black fur…

“You know,” said Adam. “You already know, don’t you? Did you find me? What was I doing? Who did I hurt?”

Ronan blinked. He didn’t know what else to do but hand Adam some coffee and uncuff him from the bedpost. “You’ve just eaten some animals,” he said, “but you haven’t hurt anyone.” 

Adam seemed to deflate. His breath spilled out over the coffee, and steam mingled in the air. “Thank God,” he said. 

Ronan shifted in his seat. It was weird having Adam in his house, in his room, in his bed… The two of them had never had a full conversation before, though Adam was friends with Gansey and would often study with him in the library or outside of school. Ronan remembered being jealous at first, but looking at Adam now, he felt a pang of guilt. 

“So you’re a werewolf,” said Ronan. He drank a lot of his coffee in one gulp, about a third of the mug, in hopes that it would pass down his throat and he would feel nothing and then could deduce that he was having a dream. His dreams were not so tame, though, and the coffee burned his tongue. Adam Parrish nodded once. His gaze sank into the coffee mug. “How does a thing like that even happen?” Ronan didn’t bother with being surprised. There wasn’t much that surprised him these days.

“You’re not going to freak out?” Adam said. “You aren’t going to go running out of your bedroom door to call the cops?”

“I hate cops,” said Ronan, “and if I was going to run from you I would have done it last night.”

Adam considered this. “Why didn't you?”

Because I’m a Dreamer, Ronan wanted to say. Because I thought I had created you. Instead, he said, “Because you were freaking people out, Parrish.” 

Adam winced. “I can’t help it,” he said, and it was so soft that Ronan almost didn’t hear him. “I’ve been this way for a year now. I don’t know why I started changing. Normally I’ll find some place to confine myself to when the Change comes, like the auto shop. Lately, though, the changes have been coming out of nowhere. I can’t predict them. Sometimes I’ll be walking home from school and feel the itch.”

“The itch?”

“Yeah, like mosquito bites all over my body. I’m assuming it’s the hair sprouting up everywhere. It’s usually the first sign that I’m about to make the Change.”

Ronan took another healthy drink of coffee. “And you don’t remember ever being bit by a rabid dog or a radioactive spider?”

“That’s Spider-Man.”

“You never know.”

Adam went quiet. Ronan took a moment to really look at him. He had dusty-brown hair, very different from the heavy black of his wolfy counterpart, and glittering blue eyes. His face — as well as everything else about him — was very angular, high cheekbones, rounded eyes, a curved mouth. His lips were a pleasant shade of deep pink. 

He was pretty, Adam Parrish.

Later, after Adam had finished his coffee and showered, and after Declan and Matthew had left, Ronan broke into his father’s study. 

It was surprisingly easy given the fact that his father was tight-lipped and Ronan had never even seen the inside of the study before, let alone set foot in it. The room still smelled like Niall. The dregs of his cologne clung to the leather of his senator chair, hid in the wilting leaves of dying plants on the windowsill. Because Ronan had never been allowed into his father’s study, he was never inclined to enter it in the wake of his death. He had almost forgotten about it.

A Kingstown desk sat dark and foreboding against the golden light of morning. There were rings over the desk’s deep brown and lacquered surface, indicating the places where Niall had placed a drink. Along the walls, standard dark wood bookshelves took up residence. Books filled their shelves, mostly, but also bottles of liquor too: Waterford decanters half-emptied with a clear tequila, Willett bourbon and Jack Daniel’s Sinatra whiskey. 

On the wall opposite the bookshelves was a leather sofa. A pillow adorned one end, and another was propped against the opposite end, on the floor. Ronan went to the couch and ran his hands over the cool leather, feeling for the indents of his father’s hips, head, or neck. His father must have dreamt here. Which of the things in this study were real? They were all tangible, but which of them was made of atoms and stardust and which were born out of Niall’s mind, here on this couch? 

Papers were shoved up into the bottom drawer of Niall’s desk. Their edges peeked out over the rim of the drawer, untidy as unkempt hair. Ronan didn’t mean to pull them out and re-right them but he did. He spread them out over the floor of the study, leaning down hard on his knees so he could glimpse the contents. One was written in a different language, and another was blank except for an insignia in the center, at the top. Most of the papers seemed to be old receipts and memos from years prior. Though Niall never said it himself, Ronan knew from Declan that his business had been of the illegal kind. It was probable that whatever Ronan found in the study would be encrypted or otherwise written in code — something only Niall knew. 

Ronan put the stack of tidied papers back into the desk drawer. He meant to slide it shut, but something in the drawer caught his eye: An upturned corner, black peering out from beneath the wood. Ronan removed the papers again, shimmied his finger into the penny sized opening, and lifted the bottom of the drawer out. 

Within it, hidden amongst rings of silver keys and a flutter of dried leaves, was a black portrait folder. 

That whispering against the shell of Ronan’s ear started up again, a call. He lifted the folder out of the drawer. He leaned his back against the wall, the heat from the morning sun filtering through the window, warming his back and his shoulder. He braced the folder on his forearms. 

Along the top, in gold filigree, was his father’s name. At the bottom, in silver filigree: RONAN LYNCH. 

Ronan wouldn’t open it. But his name was on it. But it was Niall’s. But Niall was dead.

Ronan opened it.

His breath caught. 

In the folder was a photo of a black, wiry haired dog. In the sleeve next to it, the word KEEPERS in large, black letters. Ronan read on.

 _The Dreamers, having originated the Wolves, are as such its masters. Wherever a Dreamer should go, a Werewolf shall follow, and it is only a Dreamer who may rid the world of a Wolf or grant it a new One._ Ronan had to stop. First the dreams, now wolves. It had to be something not even Declan knew about — it had to be something so dangerously secretive that Niall Lynch would keep it in a black portrait folder in a hidden drawer in a locked room. 

_Wherever a Dreamer should go, a Werewolf shall follow._ Niall Lynch was dead. Did that mean Adam came to Ronan on instinct? Like a migration? Did that mean Ronan was the only Dreamer in Henrietta? Did each Dreamer maintain their own horde of werewolves, like perverted shepherds? 

“Lynch?” said Adam. Ronan’s head snapped up from the folder. Adam was in the doorway, delicate hands on the frame, ankles crossed, the light throwing honey into his eyes. It didn’t feel right for Ronan to tell him there on the floor, behind the desk, that Dreamers owned him. That Dreamers created him. “What did you find, Lynch?”

END OF ACT I

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading this far! i don't know when the next act will be uploaded, it'll probably be months from now (well, a month or so), but it WILL happen.


End file.
